My hipster life

Instagram and Hipstamatic are two of the big names that have been rocking the smartphone world, with everyone having an iPhone taking pictures and putting that stuff online for all to see. Personally, I am not a big phone photographer, averaging maybe one shot on a phone every fortnight or so. It’s just something that I whip out when something really catches my eye or needs to be documented – and for good reason: technically, the pictures I take with my phone are horrid. They’re overly compressed, noisy, blurry most of the time, etc.

But at the same time, these low fidelity shots have something going for them. They are fleeting moments of enough beauty or urgency for me to take out my phone. My favourites are those which utilise reflections, where one image may be superimposed on another (I don’t do multi-exposures, so these are all “found” reflections”, or where my sense of lines inspires me to take the shot.

Some photos are mundane, some are beautiful, and some document my life as it happened: get-togethers with friends, being bored, doing shoots and workshops, and going to new places. From the dates of the images captured, the 43 images span a year of my life, from 13 February 2011 to 26 March 2012.

In post-processing, I tried to enhance the sharpness and clarity of these photos. Keeping with the hipster aesthetic, I applied considerable latitude in terms of colour processing, and of course, cropped to square.